Modular Desk Organizer

This project was part of my final deliverables for the awesome Computational Fabrication course taught by Prof. Jennifer Jacobs at UCSB. The project has been mostly implemented using Fusion 360, as it didn't have a steep learning curve, and I could prototype different designs quickly and use the different tools Fusion 360 had to offer. For slicing, I used the evergreen Ultimaker Cura.

My routine during the pandemic where I have been using my desk all the time has been a messy experience. Every morning I move stuff from my desk to the bed, and while going back to sleep, I move them back onto my desk. I figured during the course of my day, there are a few items which I constantly use and there are a few which I use only for specific occasions, like cup holder only once in a while but phone holder almost all the time. So, I decided to make a modular desk organizer for my personal usage and also for the final project. My main design goals was it should hold different types of holders in a single base, holders should be moveable across the base, and holders should be swappable with other holders.
Other important aspect for me was to learn Fusion 360 for different use cases, as I could see myself using that software to design in my future career or as a hobby as well.

It all has to start with the base, I initially created a simple rail-like design with 2 hollow lines in the center for the holders to go in. The base was 18cms long, which was the max I could 3d print in the printer. I was being conservative, and made the height 3 cms so as to keep the base strong enough to hold different holders.

As seen in Cura screenshot, it took a massive time of around 17 hours, and the end product looked very boxy, not at all aesthetically pleasing, and even the height looked too long.

For the second base design, I added more lines onto the base so it could hold multiple holders at once. I reduced the height to 1cm, and made the hollow lines narrow, so that the holder stays on the base by design. To make it aesthetically pleasing, I rounded the corners, and chafed the edges to remove the boxy design. This again took around 15 to 16 hours to print.

I started with a simple design by making a hollow cuboid to hold small stuff in. I made the design as a single piece in Fusion 360, and 3d printed as a single stl. Since the legs had to be printed in air (I didn't give any support structure), it didn't come out perfectly, there were some filament hanging around. This didn't perfectly fir into the base, and made a lot of noise while moving it around.

Continuing with the theme of making everything modular, I tried to make the legs of the base modular as well. In the base design, at the bottom, I made four hollow holes for the legs to fit into. Then for the legs, I wasn't sure what the right fit was, So I tested with different length, width and height of the legs, and printed them separately. As you can see in the figure, one of the legs fits in perfectly into the holder, and even movement within the base is smooth. SUCESS!

One reason for printing a lot of legs was initially I followed the approach of 1mm difference for perfect press fit. And since the temperature of my bed was 80 degree Celsius for the items to stick, it also slightly expanded one side of the leg, and hence wasn't fitting in snugly into the holder. Thus, I had to try multiple dimensions to find the perfect match.

Once the dimensions for the base and holders were fixed in, I tried experimenting with different holders for my everyday use. I measured the base radius of my pen, and my lip balm which had two different values. So, I created a holder with different dimension cylinder in a single holder for both of those above items. The next thing was the Cup holder, I again measured the radius of my water tumbler and designed the cup holder to fit that size.

I usually like to use my Kindle and my phone during the day, so the design has a bit wide U to hold both of them. As seem from Cura, this took around 3 and half hours to print which was fairly quick compared to the rest of the designs.

This was a bit complicated design compared to the rest of the holders. The underside of the controller didn't have smooth curves and hence couldn't be easily replicated on Fusion 360.

So, I went with the tracing approach which is the first time I have used this technique. Initially, We need a flexible wire to bend over the underside of the controller, and then it should hold the bends once removed. Next step is to take a High-resolution image of the wire on a white sheet of paper, and I then converted the image to Gray-scale for better contrast.

The next step is to use that image as a canvas in Fusion 360. We then need to scale the image to fit the original dimensions of the controller. There is a fantastic tool in Fusion 360 where if we specify the distance between any 2 points in image(which can be obtained by measuring the physical object), the image automatically scales to that length. Next step is to just draw a closed curve around the canvas. I printed this part separately first to see if it fits into the xbox controller before proceeding with doing the entire print.

This was divided into 2 steps. The first was the base which had holes in the bottom. Upon it a cylinder, and then a slight extrusion of an hexagon to fit in the part. On top of it, there were 2 wide U shaped designs (drawn previously) connected by a cuboid with a hollow hexagon in the center. Both the parts fit in perfectly together to hold the Xbox controller.

Here are all the Fusion files for viewing.